Goodbye, my Mission Street X

Wow, Elon Musk doesn’t do things by halves, does he? His arrival at the social network Formerly Known As Twitter has been a tale of change delivered at breakneck speed, a pace so fast even his employees struggle to keep up. And this week, Elon’s fascination with the letter “X” took on a whole new meaning when he rebranded Twitter to the 24th letter of the alphabet.

The man who obsesses over this character to the point that he owns the X.com domain might have pushed Twitter’s user base a little too far, however. Criticism has been raining in; beyond the obvious nomenclature challenges of “tweet” and “retweet”, this is a network who has reportedly lost about half its advertising revenue – even before these most recent branding changes were made. It’s nothing if not brave.

So if it’s not brave, what is it for? The speculation is that Musk wants to recreate an all-encompassing digital brand, much like the so-called “super-apps” commonly found in Asian markets. These offer a multitude of services under one brand, like a modern department store of digital products. It has worked well in those countries and other than maybe Virgin plus one or two others, we don’t see much else like it in the West. Diversity works better here as brand trust has to be earned.

Twitter has perhaps suffered the most from a lack of innovation over the years. Look how Facebook has evolved by comparison; it now competes with video shorts, short messaging (Threads) and it’s long-popular groups has always been an advantage over Twitter’s Lists. Behind the scenes, the way in which Facebook profiles its users – whether you admire it or not – is far, far deeper than Twitter can ever do. Twitter can just about recommend new users to follow based on the content you consume. It’s a long way behind.

Musk is a doer, though. Words get in the way of action and he clearly perceives risk differently to typical, run-of-the-mill conglomerates. Where those directors would worry about rocking the ship unnecessarily, trying something new that they don’t understand or hide behind big internal change programmes, Musk thinks we can all do better. And maybe we should be.

Within the world of innovation, trying things count. Merely talking about the tech isn’t enough; you need action. I think here though, Musk has probably gone too hard too fast for many. The platform has in recent days been a source of discussion about the platform itself, dominating most users’ feeds away from their usual content. And that’s not a great place to be.

Take Musk’s battle of the bots, for example. Quite rightly, he wants to reduce the levels of automation that regularly interact with our feeds. But in doing so, a new subscription model appeared to have your own blue tick, thus removing one of the major advantages – verification – that Twitter invented. Twitter was so good at this, the blue tick was copied across other networks. Annoyingly, they have also copied the subscription model too.

The growth in competitors such as TikTok and Meta’s new Threads isn’t great timing either. My two sons use TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat and when asked about Twitter, little recognition or motivation for it was registered. It’s possible that, being one of smaller social networks, this reinvention may seem some step gains, and there is some evidence – maybe due to the endless fascination of Musk – that Twitter (nay, X) is growing again. But it’s hard to see who that might be from. And in the race for value, Twitter is in real trouble.